Nascar Train Wrecks

There’s something gamers call the Madden Curse and it guarantees if an athlete appears on the cover of the EA Sports Madden NFL video game, their season will be plagued with bad luck. The Curse has been traced back to 1999, but does the curse exist for the drivers on the cover of NASCAR video games? Dale Jr. will appear on NASCAR The Game: Inside Line next month and spoke to USA Today about the curse. Jr. shrugged it off and said as long as Activision is developing the game, not EA Sports, the curse shouldn’t be an issue.

Unlike Madden which is released before the NFL season starts, NASCAR video games have been traditionally released towards the end of the race season in September. As a result, we’ve taken a look at how the drivers featured on the cover of the video game fared in races before September and those after to really see if the Madden curse affects NASCAR too. At the end of each segment we have a verdict for each year. Please note, the year of the game does not coincide with the race season. For example NASCAR 1998 was released in 1997, NASCAR 99 in 1998 and so on.[keep reading]